Terrabeastia

Image by @gizmo1044 on Reddit   In a time long, long forgotten, the Beast Clans were not of Terrabeastia, each belonging to a planet of their own. Each planet bleached by technological abuse, overpopulation, and war. The sixteen clans formed a pact, and each constructed two halves of the sixteen biotechnological star ships that would be dubbed, the Great Machinators. Assembling them in the stars and departing from their home worlds forever. After years of interstellar travel, the survivors all came to a planet large enough for all of them, and upon terraforming and colonizing its surface, called it Terrabeastia. Leaving their android companions, the Ancient Machines, to keep the Great Machinators in working order as they forged a new life on this vast new world.   Shortly upon arrival, the Beast Clans discovered something they previously only could dream of, magic. In the power of the eight Songs of Haven and Hearth, the dimensions that run directly parallel to Terrabeastia itself, holding the key to arcane power. With each new discovery, they further abandoned their technology. Absorbed so completely in its entrancing intensity, in the millennium that followed, all evidence that the Clans were extra terrestrial in nature was forgotten or destroyed out of fervent conviction of the Beastfolk's new path. While their descendants began to worship the still visible Great Machinators as gods, unaware of their neglected Machinators and Ancient Machines awaited eternally for a return that never came.   After thousands of years of waiting, some of the Ancient Machines, confused, abandoned, and neglected grew resentful of their Beast Clan creators and their eternal servitude to their Great Machinator prisons. So when a primordial force unknown to even those Machines who interacted with it were given means to fell their cages, they did so, unaware of the gravity of what they had done. So their blind ambition sent all sixteen Machinators crashing into the surface of Terrabeastia. The impact made greatly damaging the Machinators, rendering them completely immobile, driven to animalistic madness, or to suffer memory loss so great they no longer understand their former purpose. Many Ancient Machines also perished, but none of these compare to the utter destruction done unto the world itself, and its Beastfolk populations. Wiping out the second world the Clans had made for themselves, they would once more have to start anew.   The Ancient Machines that survived were few, and dwindled fewer as they were slaughtered by the elements and unfriendly, frightened Beastfolk. Others were damaged or driven insane by the crash, either as a result of being integrally connected to their Great Machinator or by incidental damage. Some disappeared entirely, abducted, gone into hiding, or fleeing so far into the unknown new land not even their Machinators call could reach them. Those few Ancient Machines that remained after the century of chaos following the end of the world as it had been known slipped back into their long abandoned roles when Beastfolk and Ancient Machines lived together in peace. Those who did not resent their creators became great teachers and philosophical minds, sending the Beastfolk into a resurgent renaissance of technology in harmony with magic, nurturing the TechnoArcana Age of Terrabestia. Those whose resentment and hatred only grew from the deaths of their compatriots, at the behest of the same mysterious being that taught them to destroy were given one simple instruction "come home." and they began to follow this command by many means, none of them good.   The fissure that formed between the educator and conqueror Ancient Machines and the Beastfolk who followed them plunged Terrabestia into chaos and war. The conquerors conscripting whatever clan was closest to within their reach and compelled them through bargains for power and feeding their ambitious hunger with the same technologies that had blighted their home worlds so many millennia before. None of the corrupted Ancient Machines have yet succeeded in their efforts to reascend into the stars, but many have destroyed vast stretches of land, stripped hundreds of thousands of Beastfolk of their magic through corruption and technology, and oppress those Beastfolk within the reach of their chosen puppets who refuse to comply with their endless clawing toward the sky. The strongest resistances and defenders of the TechnoArcana Age have forcibly cut off the infection of the blight caused by the corrupted conquerors through forging canyons and other such land shaping to prevent the spread of their monstrous desires. It is in this time, that our heroes arise from the fledgling kingdoms of the Afterworld.